


Though I Sang in My Chains like the Sea

by CloudAtlas



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Animal Death, Blood, Deaf Clint Barton, Gods and Monsters, Original Mythology, Other, Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:01:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25050577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas
Summary: Never confuse a myth with a lie.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 32
Kudos: 70





	Though I Sang in My Chains like the Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gsparkle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gsparkle/gifts).



> Written for a prompt (the quote below) by **gsparkle** as part of the [Summer Promptathon 2018](https://be-compromised.dreamwidth.org/545175.html?thread=10666903#cmt10666903) (only two years late!). Beta'd by **inkvoices**. Title from [Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas](https://poets.org/poem/fern-hill). "Never confuse a myth with a lie" is credited to the Victorian art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). Inspiration for this story comes in part from [this picture of witch Bucky](https://cloud--atlas.tumblr.com/post/177700871386/silentwalrus1-way-too-obsessed-with-witchbucky) by silentwalrus and [this wonderful story](https://cloud--atlas.tumblr.com/post/176319202547/stu-pot-ciiriianan-sadoeuphemist) by sadoeuphemist, ciiriianan and stu-pot on tumblr.
> 
> cw: there is a lot of blood in this and a lot of death, mostly of animals. It is not explicit, but it is very much a central theme, couched in the language of fairytales and mythology, and intended as an imitation of a story in that style.
> 
> “Half gods are worshiped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”  
> Zora Neale Hurston, _Their Eyes Were Watching God_

The boy knew enough to survive. The hedge witch had seen to that. He knew herbs for healing and herbs for sickness, how to set a bone, how to cure a fever. He knew how to set traps for rabbits, and for foxes, and for deer, and he knew how to skin and prepare each. He could make clothes from their skin and tools from their bones: fishhooks, needles, mallets. He could tie knots not even the strongest stag could escape and thread flowers so delicately they would not break.

The hedge witch had taught him all of this, after his village drove him out. Because though the boy could not hear and would not speak, he was not stupid.

So when he came to the edge of the land, as the hedge witch had said he eventually would – when he came to that place where the land met the salt water and the salt water met the endless sky, where to look up felt like falling down – he knew what to do.

Because to survive, he needed to know healing and hurting and trapping and sewing, yes, but he also needed to know how to gain safety.

The boy knew how to make a home out of nothing and he knew how to protect it. So the boy built a temple – a simple thing; just some rocks, enough to make a cairn – and the boy left flowers, because the boy knew that safety meant the half gods and that the half gods needed offerings.

The hedge witch had taught him that too.

The boy did not know how many summers he had seen, and he did not know his birth sign or the phase of the moon he was born under – though his village had insisted it was a bad one and cast him out as soon as his mother was buried under the oak tree. Nevertheless, his hands were strong and his shoulders broad. He stood tall and his eyes saw far.

He was not incapable.

But he could not hear and he had discovered quickly that when he spoke he was ridiculed, so he did not speak. As a result, he had been lonely. It had prepared him well for his life now; out here at the end of the world where the land met the sea met the sky.

He left pearlescent shells at the temple-cairn, when he’d eaten the soft bodies inside, and by morning they would be moved, placed in patterns that looked almost intentional, as if his half god was trying to tell him something.

It made him feel less lonely, here at the end of the world.

There were two types of gods, the hedge witch had taught him. Half gods were the common ones, the ones in wayside temples, temple-cairns, and sacred caves. They provided safety, good harvests, and clement weather in return for flowers, herbs, and occasionally wine. The hedge witch’s half god was a playful thing – she had suspected it was one of the Air Nata’s sprawling clan, who liked trickery and games – prone to knocking pestles off tables and scaring the geese, but she left it sedge and basil and campion, and in return her remedies remained pure.

The boy did not need pure remedies, but luck with his traps meant not going hungry and clement weather meant the sea did not rise up to swallow the land, lashing itself against the rocks and the dunes and threatening the boy’s home. So the boy left sedge and basil and campion.

The other – full gods, the Nata – were more demanding and more dangerous. They could not be swayed if they did not want to be and they demanded blood.

The day was bright, the rocky beach glistening and the sea reflecting the blue, blue sky. The boy was searching for oysters and barnacles and mussels, because it was not the time of year for deer or foxes or rabbits, not really. He felt the sea like an echo in his chest, like the water was trapped between his ribs, straining to get out. It vibrated his bones. He wondered if this was what sound was like, but he had no way of telling.

The smell of seaweed was strong in his nose and he had to be careful on the wet rocks. He would not hear danger approaching and there was no one to hear his cries.

There was movement in the corner of his eye. The boy’s eyesight was good, better than most, and he had learnt to trust it over and above all his other senses. It had saved his life on more than one occasion.

He turned.

He was no longer alone on the beach.

It had been almost a year since he had come here, to the end of the world, and in that time he had not seen another living person. It was lonely, yes, but his half god was there and its daily rearranging of his offerings felt like friendship, so he was largely content. It was jarring, seeing another person now, after all this time.

This person though – they were white.

Not in the way the boy was white, a pinkish white he knew was not universal because he had once met a man and his family as dark as the polished oak altar at the village temple. No, this person was white like marble, like quartz. A white stark and unnaturally natural, as if they had stepped from the cliff-face, like perhaps they would be cool to the touch. And their hair was white too, like the wool of new-born lambs, or feathers of the egret that lived by the steam that ran past the hedge witch’s home. Against the dark rocks and the blue sea and sky, they looked like a patch of snow summer forgot to melt away.

Then something startled the person – some sound or movement the boy could not discern – and the snow-white, chalk-white, quartz-white person slid into the sea and disappeared.

The boy watched for a long time, but they did not return.

The boy had almost managed to convince himself that the quartz-white person had been a hallucination – though brought on by what, he could not say – because he did not see them again for almost a season. Still, he left offerings at his temple-cairn every morning, the sun’s zenith slightly lower each day, hoping his half god would keep any potential madness at bay.

He was as far from his home as he dared to go, collecting seaweed to stockpile as fuel for the winter, when he saw the quartz-white person again.

They were a she. He could see that now, because she was stood on the rocky shore where the sea met the land, in full view, backlit by the sun that had only managed to rise two-span above the horizon.

She looked as though she had been built from snow. Her lips, her nipples, her sex, all places the boy expected to see the blush of pink, were bone white. If the hedge witch had not so vehemently denied the existence of ghosts, the boy would have assumed this woman to be one; the ghost of some unfortunate women wrecked by rough seas, abandoned by cruel masters, killed by a jealous lover.

She said something, this white woman. He saw her mouth move. But all he could do was shrug apologetically, his arms full of stinking seaweed ready to be dried.

The waves broke behind her, hurling themselves against the rocks and throwing up sprays of white foam. For a moment, the boy thought that she had disappeared, swallowed by the waves, but between one blink and the next she was back, her hair appearing to not even be wet.

She stepped off the rock, walking towards him with a stride so purposeful the boy would have marvelled at the steadiness of her bare feet on the slick, barnacle-covered rocks if he was not suddenly, utterly, overwhelming terrified.

She moved like a storm and her approach felt like being lost in the fog, like the prickle before a lightning strike. The nameless terror grew as she neared, and the boy had the sudden feeling that if this woman were to touch him he would fly apart, shatter, forever caught in a fractured feeling of falling.

But instead the woman stopped, smiled, stepped into a rock pool, and disappeared.

It took the boy several moments to convince himself to move from where he was rooted to the spot, the terror of the woman’s approach slow to dissipate even though she had gone.

Ghost did not exist, he reminded himself as he approached the pool into which the woman had disappeared. They did not exist and therefore she could not be one.

The pool she had disappeared into was shallow enough that he could reach into it and touch the bottom without wetting his elbow. And between himself and the rock the woman had been standing on, hidden from his view before, was a stretch of ocean as straight and deep as an axe wound.

Winter closed its fist around the boy’s home; slate grey skies dumping several inches of snow overnight, making the surrounding countryside look gentle and soft instead of jagged grey.

It was the season for ptarmigan, for white rabbits and for wolves. A lean season, where the boy relied more on the stores he had been patiently building all summer than his skill at setting traps. On a rare trip down to the shore one day, the sky such a flat bright white that it hurt his eyes, he was lucky to find a young whale washed ashore, dying under the weight of its own bulk. It took a week to hack its body into pieces small enough to carry; two days further to move the carcass.

Nothing should be wasted, least of all in winter. The skin would make fine shoes, the fat good candles. He could make tools from the bones and teeth; use the guts for sewing. The meat he could dry, or freeze, and it would feed him all winter. It was a good find, fortuitous, for all that his home now stank of offal.

He poured a precious cup of strong clear liquor onto his temple-cairn; thanks to the half god looking after him so well. He left some shiny pebbles he had found on the shore too, marbled like writing, a handful of iridescent shells, and some of the whale’s teeth, including a ivory talisman he had carved from one of its molars, showing the sheer cliff face and the crashing waves, the gulls and the terns and the seals, their tiny, bobbing faces no larger than his thumb.

It was beautiful and a far richer gift than necessary, but there was not much else to occupy his time during the long dark nights and he could always make more.

Then, for some reason, the boy’s luck suddenly failed.

A storm blew in, wild and hungry, hurling flurries of snow against his home. And when it had passed the temperature plummeted, sharpening the edges of the world until the boy feared moving would cause him to be cut.

He still tried to leave offerings every morning, if only strings of braided seaweed, but on this day the white world outside seemed changed; the biting cold and blinding flat white light causing the boy to stumble. Momentarily blinded he turned, tripped on a rock hidden beneath snow, and landed, hard, atop his temple-cairn, slicing his hands almost to the bone and wiping thick steaks of red blood across the snow to stand out, vivid as any wayflag, against the endless white.

_The Nata_ , the hedge witch had said _, are more demanding and more dangerous. They cannot be swayed if they do not want to be and they demand blood_.

The boy struggled to his feet, smearing bright blood on the snow and desperately trying to think of the best way to minimise the damage to his hands. Injuries in winter could lead to starvation and death. He needed his hands to hunt, to cook, to keep warm. To repair clothing and household goods. He needed his hands.

He packed snow into his wounds and turned for home.

The white woman was there.

There was terror again, the boy could feel it, but it was muted now. He was not sure why.

The woman cocked her head to one side and there was nothing human about the motion. It made him think of birds, or foxes. Perhaps that made him prey.

He blinked against the bright snow and suddenly the woman was closer, almost touching. Her skin was flawless and she smelled of cold ocean, of frost and salt. She studied him like she was sizing him up and the boy held still, fearful that the tiniest movement would cause her displeasure. He was not sure what he thought she would do, but somehow he knew, gut-sure, that it would be bad.

Suddenly the woman smiled, bright and happy, and the boy saw blood in her mouth, caught between her teeth. Against the white of her skin, it was shocking, and he flinched at the sight. The aversion of his gaze was the only reason he noticed the cord tied around her neck, and the pendant that was tied to it.

It was his carving. He recognised the gulls and the tiny seal faces.

The boy was so shocked he missed the woman moving again, this time taking his bloody hands in hers. His hands were so cold that her touch seemed fiery, each point of contact a brand, and he gasped, any noise he made torn away by the wind. The bloody snow he had packed into the gashes was pink and watery now, and there was a pink slushy pool at his feet.

The woman cradled his hands gently, seemingly fascinated by his blood. She cupped his hands, forcing them to stay curled as it welled and pooled in his palms. It was unnatural, the boy knew – wounds to palms did not bleed like this, like filling a cup with water – but before he could pull away, before he could even think it, the woman was leaning in and lapping at the blood like a cat with milk.

_They demand blood_.

The woman grinned at him through bloody teeth and cupped one of his hands around her jaw like a lover before letting it fall, leaving a bloody handprint on her face. It drew the eye; the only colour in a landscape of white and grey and palest blue. On her face, on her teeth, at his feet.

On his temple-cairn.

Realisation was a wave, crashing brutally through him. But when he looked back to the white woman, she was gone.

It took the boy until he was back inside his home, panting and terrified, to realise that his hands were whole once more; cold but unblemished and free of blood.

He did not leave his shack for three days, choking instead on tallow fumes and carefully carving protective talismans he knew he would never be able to use. And, when the need for fresh water finally forced him from his home, he found a white wolf laid out in the snow, eyes glassy and entrails steaming.

He was marked now.

The hedge witch could never fully explain the Nata, their vagaries and complexities far outstripping her ability to communicate with a young deaf boy. But she told a tale, the same tale the boy was sure was told everywhere, of what happens when a person snares a Nata’s interest.

Once, when the world was young, one of the Nata became enamoured of a young man in a village. It does not matter which Nata because different people tell different stories, but in the story the boy was told on cold winter nights it was the Nata of the Earth. The young man was given gifts; glittering rocks, medicinal plants, magnificent deer enough to feed a family for a week. There was mud, and blood, and the smell of the earth. And then one day, the young man walked into the forest and never came back.

The boy remembered the hedge witch turning to him then, hands dirty with nettle poultice, with fish guts, with wheat chaff.

_Never confuse a myth with a lie._

A whole village had not been able to stop the young man in the story from walking into the forest never to return. This boy had no one; he was alone at the edge of the world, surrounded by the ocean.

But he, too, was marked.

The boy butchered the wolf for meat, because anything else would be foolish. He began with removing the internal organs, still steaming, with the realisation that the white woman must have known exactly when he was planning to leave his home. She must have because this wolf was still warm and here something only had to be outside for a short period of time before it froze. He hesitated then, for a moment, before taking the liver and kidneys, the intestines and stomach and, after further hesitation, the heart, and laying them on his temple-cairn.

The only thing worse than catching the attention of a Nata was provoking their ire. The blood freezing on his temple-cairn made him uneasy, but there was little he could do about that now.

The boy then butchered the wolf with a meticulous care the hedge witch would have been proud of; slicing along bones and tendons with his sharpest knife and taking care not to damage the hide, which was thick and lush and would keep him warmer than any of the hides he currently owned. There was enough meat to last him the remainder of the winter, providing a welcome change to his diet of dried whale and seaweed.

Something in him resisted the idea that the Nata was being kind. But when, a couple of weeks later, he could finally don his new wolf skin, he could not help but feel like she was. It was warmer than anything he had previously worn and its beautiful, pure whiteness enabled him greater stealth when hunting.

Somehow, he felt protected. The feeling made him nervous.

He did not see the Nata again for the remainder of the winter. The nights lengthened and the darkness crept up until it closed in around him entirely, hemming him in and cutting off more than he could cope with; his blind eyes another loss atop his deaf ears, reduced to touch to remind himself of his own existence. It was stifling, oppressive, relieved not at all by tallow candles and short, blinding white days. To calm his mind he carved, dragging the bones of the whale up to his home. He carved his day-to-day life, the animals he relied upon for food, the land he relied upon for shelter. He carved his story.

The sea storms came, trapping him in his home with snow and ice and a wind he could not hear, but could feel in the dramatic changes in pressure in his ears and through the air sucked in and out via those last few cracks in his home he had not managed to plug. One storm was so bad he could not even open his door against the wind, and he hastily built a tiny temple-cairn in the corner of his room, a few pebbles and bones in a rough pyramid he hoped would appease her enough to lessen the wind, or at least let him live long enough to see the storm out and tend to his real cairn.

He had food enough to last, however, thanks mostly to the beached whale, but also to the Nata’s wolf and his stores of endless seaweed. There was snow for water and tallow for light and endless carving to while away the long dark daytime hours.

But still the winter dragged, like a bird with a broken wing, and the boy survived it as best he could. These were lean days with long nights, but the coming spring held fear as well as hope. Fear because he was marked, fear because it felt like a comfort now; a bright white wolf pelt wrapped securely around his shoulders.

And still, he carved.

The man in the story walked into the wood without coercion – every version agreed on that – and sometimes, in the blackest hour of these endless nights, the boy dreamt of drowning like breathing in.

And every evening he left an offering.

And every morning it was gone.

The first deep breath of spring was almost heady, dizzying, and the boy revelled in it, in the eggshell blue skies and the melting snows. The earth blushed green, as though the world was dreaming of summer, and he could smell growth. He stretched, reaching to the sky, and left the very first bloom he found on his temple-cairn. His food stores were almost completely depleted and he made the most of the lengthening days and rising temperatures by stripping bark, collecting first growth plants, and hunting anything foolish enough to get within close range, until finally the surrounding water was just warm enough for him to collect mussels and oysters and fresh seaweed.

For the first time in months, he ate like a king.

And then the sea birds returned home to nest.

One of the reasons the boy chose this place when he left his village was because of the enormous colonies of sea birds that nested on the cliffs northwards along the shore. They were too far away for any of the local villages to send collecting parties and he had only known of them because the hedge witch would take him on foraging journeys that would span days and days. Preparing him for her death, he now knew, for the end of her protection. But this was how her protection lived on; he would not have survived this winter without the knowledge she had shared.

She had taught him the rope making skills that allowed him to reach the nests on their sheer cliff face. She had taught him how best to avoid their sharp beaks, which breeds gave the biggest eggs, and how to carry his precious clutch back to the clifftop without damaging them.

And yet, the boy miscalculated.

His foot slipped. The rope frayed and snapped, and he was not quick enough, was not strong enough, to catch himself. All he could do was kick out, hard, against the cliff face, narrowly missing a nest, to ensure he landed in open water rather than striking the cliff on the way down.

He hit the water as a stone, the cold unimaginable as bubbles like gemstones streamed away from him, fleeing towards the surface that was now out of his reach. Terror engulfed him. Though he knew better, his body overruled; he tried to breathe, and the cold flooded his chest. He was pulled down into the cold and the dark by the unrelenting sea, kicking helplessly, succeeding only in clipping a rock.

He could not see it, but he knew now that he trailed blood as well as bubbles.

Darkness encroached, spotty with panic. It felt as though he had been here forever, in this cold, merciless ocean, but it could only have been scant moments, the cold elongating time. His body convulsed, craving air and light and warmth.

The boy would die here, he knew. Die surrounded by water and broken eggs and ribbon thin traces of his own blood.

But instead something slammed into his back, something that came at speed and from _below_. It wrapped like a vice around his chest and there was a terrifying, disorientating, rush as he was lifted through the ocean and into the bright, cold, spring morning to land, shivering but alive, on the rocks at the base of the cliff.

The boy retched, the salt of the ocean mixing with the panicked salt of his tears, and looked up.

It was her.

From this angle she towered over him, white hair plastered to white skin, and the boy felt unworthy. She was a _Nata_ – the Nata of Water surely. She was waterfalls and storm surges and torrential rain, wild and elemental and free. He was nothing; a deaf boy rejected by his village, abandoned by his parents, and only alive thanks to the kindness of a woman who herself had only been tolerated because she could heal the sick, set bones, chase away fever. He was _nothing_ , nothing at all.

He curled in on himself in shame, dragging himself up and out of the bitingly cold water he was half convinced was trying to pull him back in. The movement caused him to curl about the Nata’s feet, as if in supplication, though his terror of her was only marginally less than his all-encompassing fear of the cold ocean. But his terror was tainted now, diluted; by the fact of the wolf skin, by the fact that she’d saved him. By the fact that to fear her was to fear the ocean; undoubtedly wild and dangerous but also a source of sustenance and of unimaginable beauty.

She was life and death in stark white. To fear her was as irrational as to fear the seasons. She merely _was_.

Something tipped over in the boy’s mind, like a tossed temple coin, and he found himself pressing a kiss to the top of her foot without pausing to consider why.

The boy woke, warm and dry, on the pallet in his home, a pile of pristine white seabird’s eggs balanced precariously on the table.

Summer bloomed about the boy’s feet, and during those lengthening days he did not once see the woman. But he could feel, behind his heartbeat, an echoing boom; as though through almost drowning he had swallowed the ocean and it had lodged behind his ribs – as if he carried her with him, now. The boy found himself drawn to the beach, to the rock pools and windy dunes, every flash of white in the corner of his eye causing him to turn his head in anticipation, though it was only ever a gull, a tern, the scut of a rabbit strayed too far.

He gave offerings with deliberation now – rabbits, pheasant feathers, crowns of gorse, sage, and wild orchids – and in return he received oysters and strings of mussels, strange rocks that looked almost like plants, strange gelatinous creatures from the deep ocean with eyes as big as his palm. Until his home reeked of the ocean, briny and dark and damp, until his rhythms realigned with the tides in mind, rather than the sun.

The feeling of the ocean in his chest was almost like sound, as though the woman was speaking to him and he was getting closer and closer to being able to reply.

The day of the summer solstice dawned bright, the sky an upturned bowl of unblemished blue and the ocean in the boy’s chest storm-wild. The night before the moon had hung full and pregnant in the summer dark, tugging the sea high onto the beach like a blanket, and under its silvery light the boy had left offerings; intricately carved whale ivory and delicately etched pearlescent shells. Gifts fit for a queen. This morning his temple-cairn was laced with pearls and stained with blood, rivulets like hands reaching towards the ocean.

The boy grinned. The time had finally come.

The entire winter he had carved one of the enormous rib bones of the whale – first as a way to keep idle hands active, then to document the growing terror of being marked, and finally, as spring arrived and bloomed into summer, to chronicle his pride at being chosen. A whole wide world, and it was he upon whom favour had been bestowed; a deaf boy who had fled north before he could be exiled and had found himself here, where the earth meets the sea meets the sky.

This bone now told his story, the only thing that could. He had no village to tell it for him.

All day, with the sun high above him, the boy carved the final images – the temple-cairn, the hand-like blood, the beckoning waves – and when it was finished, he lashed it above the lintel of his home with seaweed rope and animal gut, his story facing the sea and the rising sun.

Then the boy walked into the ocean and never came back.


End file.
